Learn What They Want — For Less

Many years ago, retailers had an easier time understanding their shoppers’ wants and needs. They generally served smaller markets, allowing management to interact with customers on a regular basis. And those face-to-face interactions provided the information necessary to help determine which products belonged on shelves — and which ones didn’t.

For some retailers, this reality hasn’t changed too much, says Jim Hertel, managing partner with Barrington, Ill.-based Willard Bishop. As an example, he points to ShopRite, Keasby, N.J., noting that although the retailer’s stores are “huge and very productive,” management team members often are able to greet regular shoppers by name.

“I would say that if you’ve got a culture that has kind of a hands-on and granular feel to it, the very least expensive and probably the very best way for people to get customer feedback — whether it’s [regarding] their own-brand programs or not — is to engage them in a sincere dialogue about answering or asking the question, ‘How are we doing?”’ he points out.

But the number of retailers that do — or have the ability to do — this is small, Hertel adds. And although loyalty cards certainly are one of the most effective ways to gather shopper insights, the process of gathering and interpreting such data can be rather costly.

So how could retailers, which already operate on tight budgets, still gain critical insights on their shoppers without investing a fortune?

Give ’em a listen

With the rise of social media in recent years, it has become easier than ever for a retailer to monitor what shoppers are saying about everything from its stores’ shopability and staff friendliness to its private brand goods and promotions. Today, retailers can choose from a number of tools to help them sift through their customers’ musings on Facebook, Twitter and various other platforms and gather thoughts and opinions about particular store brand products and promotions, says Thorn Blischok, chief retail strategist for Booz & Company Inc., which houses its North American headquarters in New York.

“There are many firms that can provide such social listening on an ongoing basis — e.g., NetBase and Radian6 — or ad hoc basis — e.g., MovieQuest, Semantria, et cetera,” he explains.

Two more tools retailers could use here are Google Blog Search and Facebook Graph Search, notes Jim Wisner, president of Wisner Marketing Group, Libertyville, Ill. Google Blog Search allows users to comb through blogs — places where products tend to be discussed and reviewed “quite a bit,” Wisner says — for specific keywords and phrases, while Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine made public in July that uses an algorithm to find information from within a user’s network of Facebook friends.

In the case of the Facebook Graph Search, however, a retailer first must have a network of Facebook friends before it can view those friends’ profiles in full. To develop such a network, Wisner states that retailers typically hold a contest or offer a coupon via their Facebook page that requires users to “like” the retailer’s page to enter the contest or redeem the coupon. When the button gets clicked, the user’s profile becomes fully visible to the retailer.

After they learn what shoppers like and dislike about certain own-brand products and promotions, retailers then can discover “shopper affinities” — related products, services or causes those shoppers enjoy and write about, states Jim Lucas, executive vice president, global insights and strategy for Des Plaines, Ill.-based Schawk.

“Such affinities help deepen understanding of shoppers by providing a richer persona of who they are and what they are interested in,” he points out.

Invite them to speak

Of course, retailers also could take a more proactive approach to find out what shoppers like and dislike by inviting them to participate in online surveys, Blischok says.

“Talk about the dimensions of value, quality, taste, uniqueness — and use that as a way to do a sweepstakes, where you participate in the survey. If you win, you get $50 worth of products,” he recommends.

To deliver such surveys, retailers don’t have to rely on the member database of a costly loyalty card program — Wisner says www.SurveyMonkey.com allows retailers to create and share surveys with their friend base on Facebook.

Retailers also could create special forums and events that bring shoppers together to converse and share insights with each other and the retailer. One chain that does this is Matthews, N.C.-based Harris Teeter, Wisner says, which holds its “Taste and Tell” promotions via Facebook. Each month, the retailer selects a specific new product to give away as a freebie to the first 500 loyalty card holders that fill out a special form. In return, those people are asked to try the product and post their thoughts about it on the retailer’s Facebook wall.

As a result, the retailer both markets the product and conducts market research, Wisner explains.

“And, by the way, you’re spending a dollar instead of 250 bucks a head in a focus group,” he states.

Some retailers — particularly ones overseas — have developed even more sophisticated ways of involving shoppers on the product development side via social media. According to Lucas, Asda and Tesco in the UK, Carrefour in France and Migros in Switzerland all have created research communities or panels using their shoppers, allowing members of the communities to express their opinions via social media. And, quite often, these programs have been used to aid own-brand product development and/or offers — including Asda’s Chosen by You brand.

One noteworthy example Lucas points to here is Migros’ Migipedia website, a regularly updated encyclopedia of store brand products that allows users to participate in forum discussions and fill out product feedback forms. U.S. retailers could use free Wiki software platforms (such as MediaWiki or DokuWiki) to develop similar encyclopedias and invite their own shoppers to use them — especially their younger shoppers.

“Shoppers, especially younger shoppers — millennials — like participating [and] having a say in the [development] process,” he explains. “Moreover, younger shoppers are especially more likely to have a conversation with a retailer about their brand when it occurs in a social venue. Retailers liken these research communities to ‘massive, real-time’ qualitative.”

Lucas adds that another benefit to this approach is that participants are more likely to become brand advocates and endorse the product they help developed, bolstering the product’s credibility for other shoppers.